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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949, and raised in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin as an East Asian studies major, but dropped out of Wisconsin and finished his studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia where he majored in English and studied with Basil Bunting.

Kleinzahler is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Hotel Oneira (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize; Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems, 1975-1990 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Green Sees Things in Waves (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).

In a blurb for an early volume of Kleinzahler's work, Allen Ginsberg wrote: "August Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare—that quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Ezra Pound's work. A loner, a genius." Writing for the New York Times, Timothy Williams described Kleinzahler’s work as “a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy, with a jazzy backbeat. [His poems] are a reckless tumble of words mixing the high and the low, like a rummage sale after the death of someone who adored both Shakespeare and smut.”

His honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Acheson-Reader’s Digest Award for Poetry, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and the post of poet laureate in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Kleinzahler has lived in San Francisco, California, for over twenty years. He has held a variety of jobs, including working as a locksmith, cabdriver, lumberjack, music critic, and building manager. While living in Alaska, he designed educational kits for native children at the Alaska State Museum. He has taught writing at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, as well workshops for homeless veterans in the Bay Area.

Meat

How much meat moves
Into the city each night
The decks of its bridges tremble
In the liquefaction of sodium light
And the moon a chemical orange
Semitrailers strain their axles
Shivering as they take the long curve
Over warehouses and lofts
The wilderness of streets below
The mesh of it
With Joe on the front stoop smoking
And Louise on the phone with her mother
Out of the haze of industrial meadows
They arrive, numberless
Hauling tons of dead lamb
Bone and flesh and offal
Miles to the ports and channels
Of the city's shimmering membrane
A giant breathing cell
Exhaling its waste
From the stacks by the river
And feeding through the night

August Kleinzahler

by this poet

What I had wanted was to be chaste,sober and uncomfortablefor a sprawling episode on a beach somewheredirty, perennially out of fashion;let the smell of cocoa butter drive deep memory wildas the sun went down, a parti-colored blur,examined through a bottle of popsome kid

Green first thing each day sees waves—
the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it,
waves—which, you might say, things really are,
but Green just lies there awhile breathing
long slow breaths, in and out, through his mouth
like he was maybe seasick, until in an hour or so
the waves simmer down and then